Skill needs are shaped by structural and cyclical factors affecting the demand for and supply of skills. Economic growth, financial crisis, changes in the composition of economic output, as well as the so-called mega-trends (globalisation, population ageing and technological progress), are all important factors influencing the demand for skills. On the other hand, skill supply is influenced by labour market trends (namely participation rate, employment rate, duration of unemployment, average number of hours worked), education outcomes and investment in training activities.
Fast and frequent changes in these structural and cyclical factors call for a closer and continuous connection between employment and education. Research has shown that technological progress, for instance, only strengthens the case for more formal education and training: jobs made up of routine tasks that are easy to automate or offshore are in decline and jobs requiring cognitive skills have been growing. Even if jobs are not destroyed, in many occupations, it has become essential to periodically acquire additional skills as the ones already possessed become obsolete and the content of work changes. Coding skills, for example, are now being required well beyond the information and technology sector.
As career spans are lengthening, general education and vocational degrees acquired at the start of a working career do not provide all the skills need throughout one’s working life. At the same time, employers now have a broader range of options to get the job done: automation, offshoring, outsourcing through the use of self-employed and freelance workers or contracting the services of temporary work agencies. Overall, skilled and unskilled workers alike face the prospect that their existing knowledge and abilities becoming obsolete, unless provided with lifelong re-skilling opportunities.
In Brazil, the speed of population aging is projected to be significantly faster than what has been experienced by most developed economies. This will significantly affect both demand for and supply of skills. On one hand, demand for health and personal care services are likely to increase. On the other, the longer working lives needed to compensate for a rising dependency ratio will change skill supply too: older workers have more experience but there is also some evidence that the ability to process information declines with age.
Brazil was particularly successful in developing and adopting new technologies during the third industrial revolution. In particular, production of hardware and software was higher than in other developing economies, as well as the use of automation in the banking sector, for example. But the country has still to catch-up with the current trends of artificial intelligence, machine learning, smart and autonomous systems or the internet of things. At the same time, increasing integration into the global economy will create new opportunities and propel growth. But it will also affect the content of exports and the stage at which Brazil contributes for Global Value Chains (GVCs). Profound changes in the industrial structure are to be expected in the coming decades.
As these changes have not yet fully materialised, Brazilian policymakers have a window of opportunity to prepare for the transformations ahead. This report aims at providing policy recommendations, based on best practices internationally, to prepare the Brazilian skill development system so that it is ready to support people in acquiring the relevant skills for a changing world of work. With the majority of people affected by these changes already in the workforce, the focus is placed on adult learning systems.
Mapping available adult learning opportunities is a complex task. Adult learning refers to a very broad range of activities related to the upskilling of individuals who have already left education, including formal (i.e. school-based and to obtain a formal qualification) and non-formal (i.e. participation in seminars, workshops, on-the-job training, short courses not leading to a qualification, etc.) training. In addition, adult learning systems are difficult to define and delineate. They consist of a range of sub-systems with different actors, objectives, inputs, activities and degrees of organisation. Each of these sub-systems overlaps with other areas, such as initial education or labour market policies.
Despite these difficulties, high-quality adult learning is as a major policy tool to ensure the labour force’s adaptability in light of the changes expected to affect the quantity and quality of jobs that are available, as well as the skill-sets they require. As adult training courses tend to be of short duration and target the current generation of workers, adult learning is also a policy tool that allows for faster intervention and materialisation of results.
One key feature of the adult learning system in Brazil is precisely the provision of short training courses called “Cursos de Formação Inicial e Continuada (Cursos FIC)” (initial and continuing training programmes). Short training courses or “Cursos FIC” are professional qualification courses that do not necessarily fit within the Brazilian formal education system. Such courses do not lead to a certificate that can be considered equivalent to a secondary or tertiary educational degree. To that extent, these courses are sometimes considered free-form qualification (“qualificação livre”) as opposed to formal qualification (“qualificação formal”).
The Brazilian government has launched several initiatives in the recent years to promote participation in FIC courses. The latest of these initiatives was launched in 2011 and is called PRONATEC. A large part of this report is dedicated to assessing the pros and cons of this programme and, based on best practices internationally, to provide recommendations on how to address the key challenges identified.